Does Dofollow vs Nofollow Matter? What Changes and How to Check

Dofollow vs nofollow matters, but less than most "get dofollow backlinks" advice suggests, and in different ways than people expect. A link with no rel qualifier is the kind Google can treat as an ordinary vote for the page it points at. A link marked nofollow, ugc or sponsored tells Google not to give it that weight, yet it still sends real visitors, can still lead a crawler to your page, and fits the mixed profile that real sites end up with. The first thing to know is that "dofollow" is not an HTML attribute at all: it is just the name people use for a link that has none of those three qualifiers.

Last checked: Nov 13, 2026

Disclosure: Hed Press, which is mentioned once below, is run by the same team as EarlyHunt and the other Hunt and Aura++ sites. Every claim about what other sites do comes from a page we fetched on November 13, 2026, and the numbers are the ones we counted that day.

What does "dofollow" actually mean?

Nothing in HTML says rel="dofollow". The list of link types on MDN's page for the rel attribute includes nofollow ("does not endorse the referenced document") but no dofollow. Google's documentation says the same thing from the other side: for ordinary links that you expect Google to fetch and parse without qualification, Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links says you don't need to add a rel attribute. "Dofollow" is shorthand for exactly that: an anchor with no qualifier.

So when a directory or press site promises a "dofollow link", the only thing you can check is the absence of three words in the anchor tag, on the live page, today.

You can combine values, for example rel="ugc nofollow". A page can also carry a robots meta tag that says nofollow for every link on it, which we cover in the check below.

What did Google change about nofollow in 2019?

Before September 2019, nofollow worked like a hard stop. Google's Search Central post from September 10, 2019 says that when nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal in its search algorithms, and that this "has now changed". All three attributes (sponsored, ugc and nofollow) are treated as "hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search", used along with other signals. For crawling and indexing, the same post says nofollow became a hint on March 1, 2020.

The same post explains why Google moved to hints: links "contain valuable information", such as how the words in a link describe the page it points at, and looking at all the links it encounters "can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns". It also says that for user-generated and nofollow links, the change in most cases would not alter how they are treated, and Google would "generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes".

Read that carefully, because it supports two statements that sound contradictory and are both true:

• Google generally does not count a nofollow link the way it counts a plain one for ranking.

• Google can still read the link, learn from it, and use it as one input among many, because it is a hint and not a wall.

Bing's position, per a September 2019 statement from its search team that Search Engine Roundtable reported, is that it "always treated the nofollow link attribute as a hint", making its own decision on trusting the link or not. We have not found a public statement from either company that gives a number for how much a nofollow link contributes, and nobody outside those companies can honestly give you one.

What does a followed link actually change?

A link without qualifiers does three jobs, and only the third is the one people mean when they say "link juice".

1. It sends people. A reader who clicks does not care about rel. This is true for every link on the page.

2. It helps a crawler find you. Google's own page on making links crawlable says it uses links as a signal for the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl. A plain link from a page Google visits often is an easy path to your URL.

3. It can pass credit. Google's 2019 post describes nofollow as the option for when you "don't want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page". That tells you what a plain link is allowed to do: it can count as an endorsement. How much credit, from which page, for which query, is not published and changes over time.

So a followed link is not a ranking button. It is an eligible vote that comes from a page that has to be worth something itself. A plain link from a page nobody reads, on a site that exists to hold links, is the weakest version of this. A nofollow link from a page that many of your buyers read can be worth more to your business than a plain link from an empty page, because only one of them sends any customers.

What does a nofollow link still give you?

Clicks and customers

Visitors arrive the same way. If a launch listing or an article mentions you and a few readers click, your analytics show a referral visit and, with luck, a signup. Rel has no effect on that, which is why a founder judging a launch only by "did I get a dofollow link" is measuring the wrong thing for the first month. Our guide to editorial vs directory backlinks covers what each type tends to bring a new site.

Crawling and discovery

Google's qualify-outbound-links page says links marked with these attributes "will generally not be followed", then adds that the linked pages "may be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites, and thus they may still be crawled". That fits the hint model: a nofollow link is not a promise that the page will be missed, and it is not a promise it will be found. Treat discovery as something your own sitemap and plain links from other places should handle, with nofollow links as a bonus.

A profile that looks like the real web

This one is our reasoning, not a quote from Google, so weigh it accordingly. Real businesses collect links from forums, comment threads, directories, social posts, news write-ups and review pages, and most of those platforms apply nofollow or ugc automatically. If every link to a young site were a plain link from a link-oriented page, that pattern would look odd. Google's own words about "unnatural linking patterns" are the reason we think a mixed profile is the safer shape. We cannot prove it, and we are not claiming it.

Some people who see your name in a nofollow link will search for it later. We have no evidence on whether AI assistants read the rel value when deciding what to mention, so we would not rank links by that guess in either direction.

What do real pages actually use?

We checked a set of real pages on November 13, 2026 (IST) with curl and counted the anchors. This is a snapshot of one moment, and the counts moved between fetches on at least one page, so use it as an example of what to look for rather than as a rule.

What this table shows is more useful than any blanket statement about "most platforms":

• User-submitted and community listings (Wikipedia, Indie Hackers, BetaList, much of Show HN) lean heavily towards nofollow.

• The same page can mix both. BetaList uses two different rel values on links to the same place.

• The rel on a press release depends on the release, and even a link with no nofollow may go through a redirect address first, so check the final link and the one in the source separately.

• A news article is not automatically a followed link. In the TechCrunch piece, 7 of 8 outbound links carried nofollow, including the ones to the startup's own site.

• These numbers can change on the same day, so write down the date when you check.

So PR wires and launch platforms often use nofollow or ugc, but "often" is the honest word: we checked one wire, not all of them.

How do you check the rel attribute in about 30 seconds?

Pick the page where your link lives and the domain you hope it points to. The three methods below take under a minute each, and the first one takes about ten seconds.

Method 1: browser devtools

Open the page, right-click the link and choose Inspect. The highlighted line is the real anchor tag. Look for rel= inside it. If it is missing, the link has no qualifier. To check every link to your domain at once, open the Console tab and paste this, replacing yourdomain.com:

[...document.querySelectorAll('a[href*="yourdomain.com"]')].map(a => a.href + ' rel=' + (a.getAttribute('rel') || '(none)'))

That reads the page as the browser built it, including links added by JavaScript after load. It prints one line per link, so a page that carries two links to you shows both.

Method 2: view source

Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac in Chrome), then Ctrl+F and search for your domain. This shows the server's HTML before JavaScript runs. If the link is there, read its tag. If it is not there but shows up in devtools, JavaScript inserted it.

Method 3: curl and grep

From a terminal, this prints every anchor that points at a path or domain you name, with the noisy attributes removed:

curl -sL "https://betalist.com/startups/dataminimal" | grep -Eo '<a [^>]*href="[^"]*dataminimal/visit"[^>]*>' | sed -E 's/ (class|data-[a-z-]+)="[^"]*"//g' | sort | uniq -c

On November 13, 2026 that command printed:

2 <a target="_blank" href="/startups/dataminimal/visit">

5 <a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="/startups/dataminimal/visit">

Swap in your own page URL and the part of your link to search for. To check several pages in a row, put one URL per line in a file called pages.txt and wrap the same pipeline in a loop:

while read u; do echo "$u"; curl -sL "$u" | grep -Eo '<a [^>]*href="[^"]*yourdomain\.com[^"]*"[^>]*>' | sed -E 's/ (class|data-[a-z-]+)="[^"]*"//g'; done < pages.txt

We tested both commands against live pages on November 13, 2026. Print the whole tag, because a version that only extracts rel="..." silently skips anchors that have no rel, which is the exact case you are trying to find. Some sites return a 403 page to curl (Product Hunt did), and some build links only in JavaScript; in either case use the browser methods.

Two more things that can switch every link off

A page can carry <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> in its head, and a server can send an X-Robots-Tag header. Either one applies to the whole page. Check with:

curl -sI "https://example.com/page" | grep -i x-robots-tag

and by searching view-source for name="robots". When we ran that on a sample page it printed a robots meta of "index, follow" and no X-Robots-Tag header, which is what you hope to see. Google's own Links report in Search Console is not a substitute: its help page says the report doesn't specify if a link is marked as nofollow and shows a sample of links, not a full list.

If you would rather paste a URL than open a terminal, the free Aura++ dofollow link checker lists every link on a page to your domain with its rel value and anchor text. It reads the server HTML only, so, like view source, it will not see a link that JavaScript adds later. For a longer walkthrough of every checking method and the traps that cause misreads, Aura++ has a separate guide on how to check if a backlink is dofollow.

Where do followed links usually come from?

"Usually" is doing real work in that sentence, because the TechCrunch example above shows that even a news article can mark its outbound links nofollow. These are the places where plain links are more common, and none of them is guaranteed.

• An editorial article or news story about your product. A writer or editor chooses to link to you inside a sentence about what you do. The choice is theirs, which is why you cannot order the rel value and should check it after publication. Our guide to getting a news-style feature article about your startup covers what to send and what to expect.

• A niche guest post. A post you write for a site your buyers read, with an author link or a link in the text. Some sites mark guest links nofollow, so confirm before you invest time. The difference between guest posts, editorial links and niche edits is covered in SideHunt's comparison of guest posts, editorial links and niche edits.

• Some badge-gated directories. A few directories give a plain link if your site links back to them with a badge. That is a swap, and Google's spam policies list "excessive link exchanges" among link spam examples, so one deliberate swap is a judgment call and a whole profile built on them is a pattern. IndieHunt's list of free startup directories that still give a followed link sorts them by what they ask in return.

• Partners, customers and integration pages. A customer writing about how they use you, or an integration page from a partner, is usually a normal link because a person wrote it for readers.

If you want a news-style story where the plan is stated up front, a launch story on Hed Press is one option: its pricing page, checked on November 13, 2026, says the product link is dofollow on the free plan that credits hedpress.com and on the $29 package, and nofollow on the free plan that needs no site credit. It does not promise a ranking, a citation or traffic, and neither do we. Whatever route you pick, open the live page and check the rel yourself.

Dofollow vs nofollow: what each can and cannot do

A 30-minute rel audit you can run on your own links

If you already have a handful of links, this is a better use of an afternoon than buying more.

1. List the pages that link to you. Start with Search Console's Links report (a sample, per Google), then add anything you remember: launch listings, directories, articles, partner pages. Put each URL in a sheet.

2. Check each page with the curl loop or the Aura++ checker. Record the exact rel value, or "(none)", and today's date. Put "not found" if the link is missing.

3. Check the page-level settings. Note any robots meta nofollow or X-Robots-Tag header.

4. Rate each source on its own merits. Is it a page real people read? Is it on topic? Does it send any visits in your analytics?

5. Decide per link. Keep, ask, or ignore. The next section explains when to ask.

6. Set a re-check date. Listings change, and the HN counts above moved within minutes.

Here is a made-up example so you can see the sheet. The figures are invented for illustration and are not data:

Should you ask a site to change nofollow to dofollow?

Usually no. A site that nofollows every outbound link, as Wikipedia does, will not change it for you. An editor who chose to link to you has already decided how the link reads, and asking them to alter the attribute is more likely to cost goodwill than to gain anything. Ask only when a person agreed to a plain link and a template added nofollow by mistake. Ask once, in one line, and let it go.

What are the common mistakes?

• Treating dofollow as a ranking guarantee. It is the absence of a qualifier, nothing more.

• Treating nofollow as worthless. It sends visitors, may get you crawled and is part of a normal profile.

• Believing a site's label. "Dofollow directory" on a landing page is a claim, not a check. Open the live page.

• Confusing noopener with nofollow. They do different jobs; the table above shows each.

FAQ

Is dofollow an actual HTML attribute?

No. There is no rel="dofollow". A dofollow link is an ordinary link with no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value. Google's documentation tells you to leave rel off links that you want treated as regular links.

Do nofollow links help SEO at all?

Google says they are hints, used with other signals, and that it will generally treat them as it did before 2019: not for ranking purposes. They can still send visitors, may lead to crawling and add to a natural-looking link profile. No public source gives a number for the effect, so we do not claim one.

Are nofollow backlinks worth getting?

If the page is read by your buyers or is a credible place to be mentioned, yes. Judge a source by the audience and the page, then record the rel as a fact about it.

How can I tell if a link I got is dofollow?

Open the page, inspect the link and read the anchor tag. If there is no nofollow, ugc or sponsored value in its rel and the page has no robots nofollow, it is a regular link. The browser console snippet, the curl loop and the free checker above all do this.

Do AI assistants care about rel attributes?

We found no source that says either way, so we would not choose links based on a guess. What is safe to say is that clear, accurate pages that describe your product give readers and answer engines something to quote, whatever the rel on a link to them is.

What should you do next?

Run the audit on the links you already have, write down the rel and the date, and keep the ones that send readers. Aim new effort at pages your buyers actually read, check each new link on its live page, and treat a plain link as a bonus. If you are about to launch, launch on EarlyHunt and check what rel your own listing gets.